SnappyData, a real-time data analytics company launched in January earlier this year by three veterans of software developer Pivotal, said Thursday they it raised $3.65 million in financing in a round led by GE Digital, Pivotal and GTD Capital.

The company has created software that helps a corporate customer analyze transactional data in real time, according to SnappyData Chief Operating Officer Sudhir Menon. SnappyData builds on the in-memory distributed data management platform GemFire, now owned by Pivotal. Mr. Menon co-founded SnappyData with Richard Lamb, president, and Jags Ramnarayan, CTO. The three men also are GemFire product veterans.

SnappyData is adding a capability that Mr. Menon refers to as approximate query processing, which he says relies on probabilities to compensate for somewhat less-than-perfect answers, a balance that reduces data storage needs and speeds up processing. “If you can live with answers that are 95 to 97 percent accurate, we can use statistical techniques that allow you to store less data and run … much faster,” he said in an interview.

“From talking to customers it is very clear that they wanted to be able to bridge the divide between transaction applications and business and analytics applications that inform how they run the business,” Mr. Menon said. “It becomes the only sustainable business advantage that enterprises can hope to have, a deeper and quicker understanding of the data that powers their business.”

“We look forward to working with SnappyData in their efforts to address industrial IoT real time data processing,” Marc-Thomas Schmidt, chief architect at GE Digital, said in a statement. Such capability is important for Predix, GE’s so-called industrial Internet of Things platform, he said.

The investment brings SnappyData into a complex Web of companies with a history of cross-ownership. Pivotal itself is partially owned by EMC, which is being acquired by Dell. EMC also owns part of VMware, which previously owned GemFire. General Electric Co., EMC and VMware backed Pivotal, a company based on Pivotal Labs, a long-standing fixture of the tech scene in San Francisco.

CORRECTION -- This article has been updated to say that GE Digital invested in SnappyData. An earlier version of this article attributed the investment to GE Ventures.